More Training & Monitoring Needed at Immigration Department

Therese Chavarria

The Senate Special Select Committee has been soliciting most attendees of the public hearings for their ideas on how the Immigration Department can be improved. While it has become clear that a culture of corruption and hustling pervaded the Department, the will to remove it has been absent.  As a public officer for more than thirty years, nearly all of that time spent in the Immigration Department, Therese Chavarria on Wednesday identified several issues for the Department to address. These include regular training of officers, which she revealed had been stopped for unknown reasons several years ago and not restarted despite conversation at the top.  There is also the issue of constant monitoring and evaluation of staff and ending political interference.

Therese Chavarria, Retired Immigration Officer

“I think we need to have – maybe it could be senior officers, or maybe retired officers or somebody from the Government service – who could do monitoring; visit different districts, visit the offices, recheck the receipts, recheck the visas; do a check and balance; check the visas, check the passports if possible, check the permits and this needs to be done constantly. From my observation, it is not being done. So we need to implement proper monitoring. Another thing – training. I always stress training, training, training. I think the Department would do good with a training unit. I could recall in the ‘90s myself and some officers used to come to the Police Academy for training; that is no longer being done. We need to have a Training Unit where we can do training and include training such as honesty, force, court procedures, integrity and ethics, anti-corruption – these are some training that must be included and definitely we need to stop the political interference.”